The Siege of Eternity e-2

by Pohl Frederik

  There was a goddam limit, Hilda Morrisey told herself, to the number of things she should have to worry about at one time. How many crazinesses were going to be thrown at her? She sat down, trying to collect her thoughts. Merla Tepp appeared from nowhere, silently bearing a cup of coffee, and when Hilda looked at the woman's face there was one more annoyance staring at her. The woman had the expression of someone more put-upon than was bearable-even more put-upon than Hilda herself, though perhaps for different reasons. (What was it with Tepp? It couldn't be just the fact that she loathed the aliens. Was there some personal problem? And if there was, who cared?) Hilda put her aide's problems out of her mind and concentrated on what was going on.

  Hilda Morrisey had presided at plenty of interrogations in her career, but never one like this. This time the subjects were doing their best to spill every last thing they knew. In fact, they were doing it nonstop, their mewing voices sometimes plaintive, sometimes yowling mad, but what they were carrying on about no one could say.

  It was the translator who was the problem. Dopey was not cooperating. Occasionally he mewed irritably back at the Docs, mostly he merely sat huddled silently on his perch, eyes closed in suffering, tail plume dull and dejected. From where the observers sat on the other side of the one-way glass they could see Patrice, in the interrogation room with the subjects, where she had been for the last hour. She was expostulating with Dopey, but he was ignoring her as well.

  Patrice sighed and came out. "I need a break," she said, looking at the linguistics team as they hovered over their frequency analyzers and screens. "You guys getting anything?" she asked.

  The head of the team shook her head. "Can't te\."Well, Hilda thought, theirs was a pretty forlorn hope to begin with. A language was not like a cipher, and all the computers in the world were not likely to solve the translation problem.

  While, infuriatingly, the finest translation system the world had ever known was sulking on his perch not a dozen meters away, and refusing to help. "If we could just get a few sentences that were in both languages to match up, we might make a start," the woman said pensively. "Like the Rosetta Stone, you know."

  "Damn the Rosetta Stone and damn that goddam freak," Daisy Fennell said. "Don't we have any way to make the little bastard cooperate?"

  Patrice Adcock looked almost amused. "What would you suggest? Threaten his life, maybe? But he isn't worrying about dying. He thinks he'd get brownie points with the Scarecrows if he died doing something in their service-like refusing to translate for the Docs."

  Technology Analysis, NBI

  Agency Eyes Only

  Subject: "Virtual energy" and tachyon transport

  According to quantum theory there is no such thing as a "vacuum" anywhere in the universe. Everywhere-at the heart of a star, on a planet like the Earth, even in the great "voids" between clusters of galaxies-every volume of space, however tiny, is constantly seething with a boil of "virtual" subatomic particles, particles which appear spontaneously, interact with others, are mutually destroyed by canceling each other's charges out and disappear-so rapidly that they are impossible to detect.

  But-theory suggests-they don't always disappear. In fact, the birth of the universe in the "Big Bang" can be best understood as a sudden explosion of such particles which somehow are not annihilated, but survive, and increase-and, indeed, become everything we see in the vast universe around us.

  Is it possible to reproduce this process artificially? If so, can the generated particles be the ones needed to create particular atoms? And, if this is also so, can this be the way the Scarecrows' tachyon transporter builds the raw materials to make its copies?

  "Who said anything about dying? He can feel pain, can't he?" "Oh, no," Patrice said, shaking her head. "Put that idea right out of your mind. I've told you. He's too fragile for us to beat it out of him. You know we actually killed a Dopey, back when we were captives. Didn't take much, either. Martin Delasquez fell on him, and he died." She thought for a moment, then added, "That time it seemed not to have mattered particularly, because another Dopey popped up right away. But now-"

  Hilda knew the answer to that. Now they had only the one Dopey, with no magical mystery transporter box to create another if they wasted this one. Hilda appreciated the difficulties of the situation. She appreciated, too, the fact that Vice Deputy Director Daisy Fennell was here to carry the can. That was a break. If anyone was going to be associated with a failed enterprise, she didn't want it to be herself.

  She became aware that her aide was clutching the back of her chair. "What is it, Tepp?"

  The woman looked even more haggard than usual, her face strained, her demeanor peculiar-in fact, Hilda thought, Tepp had been acting even more than ordinarily strange ever since they got there. "Nothing, ma'am," she said thickly.

  Hilda glared at her. "Nothing, my ass. Are you going to puke again?"

  Tepp seemed frightened. "Oh, no, ma'am, I don't think so. But that smell-"

  Hilda sighed, resigned. The time had come. She said crisply, "You're relieved. Get out of here. Go back to Arlington for reassignment."

  "Ma'am!"

  "Go!" Hilda ordered, and turned her back on her former aide. Not for long. When she heard a pathetic throat-clearing from behind her, she turned back, now angry. "You still here?"

  Tepp held her ground. "Yes, ma'am. I'm going, ma'am, but there's one thing-"

  "For Christ's sake, what now?"

  "It's my aunt. I promised I'd come and see her tonight, and I didn't get a chance to call her before we left the headquarters. She's sick. If I could just have permission to use a phone for a minute-"

  Hilda shrugged. It wasn't exactly giving permission, but it wasn't a flat rejection, either. As Tepp hurriedly left the little viewing room Hilda didn't even look after her. Merla Tepp was now a dead issue.

  She turned to Patrice Adcock. "Didn't Dopey say anything at all when you told him about all the bugs?"

  "He was delighted to hear about it," Patrice said sourly. "He asked me half a dozen times if we were sure it was the same kind of bug I had. The Docs were doing their best to ask him what was going on. He mewed something at them, but then he paid no attention to them at all. Then he said to me, 'You'll see,' and went back to not talking. I took that as a threat. I think-"

  "Wait a minute," Makalanos said suddenly. He turned to the linguistics crew. "Did you get that? See if you can check what he said to the Docs right then, the first thing after Dr. Adcock told him about the bug."

  "Hey," said the linguist, coming alive. "Good point! It might help." And indeed it might have, but not right then. That was when the interrogation came to an abrupt halt, and it was Merla Tepp who halted it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Outside the zoo cage Merla Tepp took a deep breath, forcing herself to be calm. She wasn't surprised at what had happened. The brigadier had been on the point of firing her often enough before, but she couldn't help wishing it had happened just a little later. She was going to miss the job. She would even miss Hilda Morrisey herself, a wicked woman, certainly, but in some ways an admirable one—

  There was no use thinking that way. She knew what she had to do.

  She turned her back on the armed guard, who had been looking at her with some concern, and marched to the office of Lieutenant Colonel Makalanos. His assistant, transmitting copies of the Doc's latest drawings to headquarters, looked up in surprise. "Out," Merla ordered. "I have to make a secure call."

  The man got up to leave, looking baffled but obedient, and Merla sat before his screen. When she had terminated the assistant's transmission she sat for a moment, moving her lips in silent prayer.

  Then she dialed the number in Roanoke, Virginia, and spoke to the placid, gray-haired lady whose face appeared on the screen. "Aunt Billie? I'm really upset. Brigadier Morrisey has fired me as her aide, and I don't know what to do."

  The woman looked concerned, though not particularly surprised. She tsk-tsked sympathetically. "That's too bad, d
ear. I know how you must feel. Is there any chance that she'll change her mind?"

  "I don't think so."

  "What a pity," the woman said vaguely. She paused, shaking her head in regret. Then she came to a decision. She said, "I'm sorry if I sound a little upset. It's one of my bad days, you see. The left knee and both elbows again-I'm afraid I'll have to have the surgery very soon now."

  Tepp caught her breath. "The knee and the two elbows? When?"

  "Oh, very soon. As soon as possible, in fact. I wish it weren't necessary, but there's no sense in putting it off any longer, is there?" She was silent for a moment, then, briskly, "I'm afraid I must go now, dear. I'll pray for you."

  Tepp terminated the connection and sat for a moment, breathing deeply. Then she stood up and left the office. "Thanks," she said to the assistant, and headed back for the cage. The outside guard had gone back to his daydreaming but he woke up quickly when Tepp ordered: "Give me your weapon."

  "Do what? But I can't-"

  "It's Brigadier Morrisey's order," she said, taking it from him and checking the safety. "Here, you can ask her yourself." And she pushed the door open.

  Inside Hilda Morrisey turned to glare at her. "Now what the hell do you want, Tepp?" she demanded, and then saw the gun.

  The guard, suddenly alert, reached for the weapon. Merla Tepp was faster than he was. She stepped back and put a quick round into his right thigh; the man screeched like an owl and collapsed as she set the weapon to full automatic and, sobbing aloud at last, sprayed Hilda and those devil-inspired alien monsters from Hell. She got off half a hundred rounds before she realized that Lieutenant Colonel Makalanos had a gun of his own and he had drawn it.

  Too late she turned toward him. When his first shot hit her right in the breastbone it was like being struck with a leaden baseball bat, and that was the last Merla Tepp knew of anything at all in this life.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  For Daisy Fennell it was the worst night of her long career with the Bureau, and it went on forever. Dr. ben Jayya dithered uselessly over the casualties, protesting that he was a research M.D., not a caregiver, but someone had already called the paramedics.

  They were there in five minutes, three cars of them, screeching past the startled UN guards with their siren going. It took them a lot longer than that, though, to figure out what to do once they got there. The leg of the wounded guard was all in a day's work for them. So was the lobe of Dannerman's ear, which he had nearly lost to Tepp's spray of fire. For Hilda Morrisey the big problem was stopping the bleeding from her throat, and getting her into one of the ambulances on the very faint chance that she would still be alive when she got to the emergency room.

  And there was nothing at all to be done for either Tepp herself or for the one of the Docs who now lay doubled-over on the floor and exuding great amounts of a pinkish fluid, beyond doubt well and truly dead.

  It was the other two extraterrestrials that were the problem. Tepp's shot had caught Dopey in his great, colorful fantail. And, though he was complaining bitterly about the agony he was suffering, he had allowed Camp Smolley's medics to dress the wound as best they could. The surviving Doc was another matter. He had taken three of Tepp's rounds. Two were in his left major arm and, though whatever he had for a tibia had been shattered, those wounds didn't seem immediately life-threatening. It was the one that had struck his chest that worried the medics. The bullet was still in there, and he was mewing softly in pain as he lay flat on his back on the floor, with Pat Adcock-Pat One-comfortingly holding one of his lesser paws.

  The head medic looked up from where he was bent over the golem's torso, his face grayish. "That bullet has to come out," he informed Daisy Fennell. "Do you authorize us to do it?"

  Fennell hesitated, wishing she could buck that question to somebody higher up, like the deputy director. She couldn't. She temporized. "Do you know what you're doing?"

  Pat Adcock spoke up. "Of course they don't know what they're doing," she said scornfully. "Why don't you get that Walter Reed doctor out here? She's the only one who knows anything at all about Doc Anatomy."

  "Dr. Evergood? But all she did was take a bug out-"

  "Do you have any better ideas?"

  And, of course, she didn't. When they got Dr. Marsha Evergood she looked tousled and sleepy and pretty damn mad. "Have you stopped the bleeding?" she demanded. "Applied broad-spectrum antibiotics? All right, then get him over to Walter Reed right away; I'll meet you there."

  "We thought maybe you might want to come out here," Daisy offered, aware she was sounding uncharacteristically humble.

  "Think that one over again, lady. Bring the dead one along, too; I'll use the cadaver for a quick anatomy course. Now."

  No matter how much Daisy Fennell tried to hurry him along, Dr. ben Jayya was being a pain in the ass. No laboratory specimen, he was insisting firmly, should ever be transported anywhere until it was stabilized, preferably by soaking it in formaldehyde first, Fennell overfirmed him. "Shut up," she said, and turned her back on the biologist to beckon to Colonel Makalanos.

  "Get some ice," she ordered. "Pack him up and let's get the two of them the hell out of here."

  The trouble with that was that the medevac chopper was barely able to cope with the weight of the two extraterrestrials, one in his plastic body bag filled with ice cubes, the other with the head medic standing by with spare compresses if needed on the way. Daisy and the Dopey had to wait for another helicopter to be summoned.

  Reverend Portman Denies Responsibility

  At the headquarters of the Christian League Against Blasphemy, their spokesman, the Reverend Alec Portman, declined to be interviewed but issued this prepared statement:

  "We deplore the actions at Camp Smolley. If it is true, as has been alleged, that the woman who committed these vile crimes was associated with some members of our organization, she has done our cause no good. It is our belief that these alleged creatures from space are indeed evil, and may be incarnations of the Devil. However, we are nonviolent. We accept no responsibility for these alleged acts. If these creatures had been returned to the Hell they came from, as has been in our prayers ever since they arrived, none of this need have happened."

  - The New York Times

  When she finally got to Walter Reed the two Docs lay side by side in the operating room. Evergood had already slashed the corpse's torso open and an assistant was severing ribs-what looked like ribs, anyway-with a power bone saw.

  It was more than Daisy Fennell wanted to endure. She fled. In the nearest ladies' room she locked herself in a cubicle and sat. She was breathing hard, and most of her thoughts were not about the surgery going on a few dozen meters away.

  The subject uppermost in Vice Deputy Fennell's mind was her career, and whether she was still going to have one by this time the next day.

  Of course, the whole damn screwup was Hilda Morrisey's fault. Hilda was the one who had taken this Merla Tepp on as her aide and thus given the woman access to biowar.

  But Hilda was not in a condition to be put on trial, at least for now, and neither was the Tepp woman. Permanently. That wasn't Fennell's doing; she wasn't the one who shot Tepp dead.

  But she was the senior officer present, and so she knew who the responsibility would belong to. She shuddered.

  It was bad, but it would get a lot worse if the deputy director arrived and caught her screwing off in the crapper. She stood up, marched to the washstand, splashed water on her face, looked at herself in the mirror, shuddered again and resolutely went back to the operating room.

  To her surprise, she was allowed inside, but not before one of the other doctors stopped her with orders to scrub up and put on a surgical mask. When Daisy protested he snapped, "Right, the Docs didn't bother with asepsis, but we're going to do it Dr. Evergood's way. Use that washstand, and plenty of soap."

  The Docs hadn't bothered with anesthesia, either, and there wasn't anything Dr. Evergood could do about that; she didn't dare try putting her patien
t out, or even numbing the immediate vicinity of the wound. The patient seemed to accept that. The mewing stopped. He lay immobile, eyes closed, and the only sign that he might be feeling pain was the trembling of his lesser arms while Evergood cautiously widened the entrance wound and probed for the bullet. It took her a while to navigate through the unfamiliar architecture of the Doc's muscles and blood vessels, but when she finally extracted the round she breathed a sigh of relief. She doused the whole area with broad-spectrum antibiotics and stood up wearily, regarding her patient.

  Who opened his eyes and gazed at her for a moment, then turned to Pat One, miming writing something with his lesser arms.

  "He wants to draw some more pictures," Pat guessed. "Can I let him?"

  Evergood shrugged. "Why not? Make sure you give him clean paper and a clean pen, and don't let him touch the dressing. Fennell? Let's go talk."

  Daisy Fennell was glad enough to get out of there; she hadn't been willing to leave while the operation was going on, but the smell of the Doc was getting to her. They found the deputy director outside, snapping orders to his portable screen in Colonel Makalanos's office, but he switched it off when he saw them.

  Evergood got right to the point. "The bullet s out, I've stopped the bleeding and now we have to watch for infection. I'm hoping there won't be any. If there are any disease organisms around, they're probably terrestrial ones, and the antibiotics should deal with them. Of course, we'll have to do something about that arm."

  "Thanks," he said, and remembered to add, "A fine job, Dr. Evergood."

  It was a dismissal, and the surgeon took it that way. Then he turned to Daisy Fennell.

  "Jesus, Daisy," he remarked. "You let things go pretty sour, didn't you? Tepp dead, Morrisey close to it. The Dopey and one of the Docs wounded-and we can't get the other one to care for them, because he's dead, too. Well. Let's get the facts. We'll have to have a court of inquiry, but for now, start talking."